Wherein Peele and Poon blog about games and stuff.

Tag Archives: Mirror’s Edge Catalyst

“Sweet baby Jesus, it’s happening.” Yes, brain that apparently watched Talladega Nights recently, it is happening. A sequel to 2008’s Mirror’s Edge is in development. Well, one has been in varying states of development since 2011, but it came and went like a Mary Poppins of gaming: swiftly happy and then suddenly sad.

But that’s all behind us and Mirror’s Edge Catalyst is mostly around the corner. With a hands-on showing at E3 this year, you are set loose upon the city with a sampling of some side missions to tackle. It’s not much, but it’s enough to say that Catalyst seems to be a wonderful confluence of old and new.

You once again settle into the red shoes of Faith, the series’ parkour-enabled protagonist. The game aims to explore Faith’s origins while exposing the underlying evils simmering in the City of Glass. You play from a first-person perspective, using a complex but rewarding control scheme to slide under obstacles, clamber up walls, and leap from roof to roof.

The two biggest changes, though, are where the meat is at. First off, there is no gun combat in Catalyst. In the first Mirror’s Edge, Faith admonished the use of firearms, a notion the game reinforced by only providing one or two shots per gun acquired. But now, Faith doesn’t wield them at all.

Instead, the focus is on movement as a weapon. As long as you are in a successful and flowing line, Faith is invincible and able to take down the enemies that crop up on your way. It rewards you for skillfully playing the game as both you and the developers desire, not having you work around a strangely long-distance concession for effective henchmen.

The second change is that Faith will be operating in an open world. Rather than moving between discrete levels where the end of one sequence leads directly to the start of another, you will be futzing about within the actual City of Glass.

To be totally honest, that bit terrified me when it was announced during EA’s press conference. I loved that the entirety of the first game was aimed at being a single flow, not just between levels but within the stages themselves as well. But the open world actually works.

Even the idea of an Ubisoft-esque map full of blips of courier and hacking and time attack missions doesn’t seem so bad because it feels still like that single flow I liked so much before. Momentum and movement makes dashing around the city while racing Icarus (another runner from the story) or bashing the heads of dozens of guards on a rooftop seem more contiguous than you’d imagine.

It all feels like a natural extension of the core premise of a fluid existence. Go high to mantle a wall and then go low to roll out of the big landing and then go high to kick a dude’s face in. It’s a promising refinement of what we remember from before. Let’s just hope Mirror’s Edge Catalyst can figure out what else to spruce up and what to drop.

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst comes out for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on February 23, 2016.